flores is
Dashboard
widget that provides an ambient monitor for your
Apple Mail or Gmail status.
It shows a flower for each new email in your account, up to four.
In addition, it can filter for text in the sender or subject of your emails,
allowing you to watch for email from that special someone. Support for
four colors:
purplebluebrown
and
green
(mouse over to see) allows you to put multiple vases on your desktop,
distinguishing between different settings.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you're using Safari, click the download link.
When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to
display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.
If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the
widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in
your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar
and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

flag for ecotopia

version history

6/21/05: flores 1.4 fixes google's change of RSS feed URL.

5/18/5: updated icon/default image to match four-flowers view, matching ottmar.
I actually like it better the original way, but it looks funny when it drags. Minor
change, no new version number.

5/6/5 @ 5:30pm: Changing the vase color is working - there are four colors to
choose from: classic purple, plus brown, green, and blue. Those were the only
colors to come out decently. I'm ready to release that tonight, but I'm afraid
I'm really driving the widget sites crazy with my overly frequent updates. I
don't mean for it to be so quick, it's just that stuff turns out to be easier
than I expect.
I also just worked out the resize error that someone complained about - where
the image resizes quickly before flipping. In my opinion, it's Apple's bug,
but I figured out how to work around it. geek detail: before doing a flip
transition, you're supposed to freeze the image and make changes while it's
frozen, so the user doesn't see it. So, you'd think you should do the resize
then, right? Well, no. If the image gets smaller, you have to resize after
the flip; if it gets bigger, you have to do it before freezing. Nonsense.

5/6/5 @ 2:20am: flores now supports Apple Mail.
This was the single most requested feature and, quite frankly, I didn't really
want to do it. I happen to like gmail, and I didn't want the interface to have
too many options. Mail support was surprisingly easy to implement, requiring
a single line AppleScript code, and the interface is cleaner than ever. Gmail
users will be as disappointed as I am that Apple Mail is the default - but it's
really much simpler this way. Using Apple Mail requires no configuration
whatsoever, since you don't need to enter a password. Just fire it up and
it works.

I am considering growl support for 1.3, but I'm not keen on the idea of a widget
demanding attention when the dashboard is closed. Thinking about it.